#RIWP18

"It's about the people, as with all good things in life."
      + Troy Hicks

Attending my first RI Writing Project conference was a whirlwind. I didn't expect the six hours to fly by like they did, but when you're actively engaging in new perspectives on digital learning and literacy in the classroom, I suppose that's what happens! 

The number one question I came away with in mind from Troy Hicks' keynote address was: How do we help our students become not only consumers but creators of knowledge? Hicks discussed the necessity of teaching students to not just mindlessly consume the information presented to them on a daily basis, but to become critically engaged with with, to the ends of questioning, reclaiming, and recreating. That he also challenged us, the educators and teacher candidates, to question what we knew and believed about what we consider credible evidence, what passes for "good" knowledge, and then how we exist with these all these knowledges, was thought-provoking. It affirmed for me that as teachers and educators, we don't know it all, but are in a constant flow of learning. And that's okay. It's a process.

This was a theme that carried through in the two workshops I attended, "Empowering Writers -- Ira Shore's Problem Posing Writing for a Democratic Classroom" and "Digital Storytelling." In the first workshop, Amanda Scott from Portsmouth High broke down Ira Shore's Problem Posing Writing into a framework that made the information a little simpler to digest:

1. Pose the problem
2. Reflect on the problem
3. Literacy development/skills exercise
4. Group reporting and class dialogue
5. Synthesize and re-present

Our question? What does a democratic classroom look like?

 

My group's final essay.

For fifteen minutes alone, we each wrote our own thoughts about the question, and then for ten minutes we brainstormed main ideas together in groups of 2-3. The end goal was to write a well-written essay showcasing these ideas -- and then to read the essay to the class. Ideally, this would take between 2-4 classes in a HS setting to complete, if not longer, but we made do in our seventy-five minute session. The results were rewarding, and it was cool to hear everybody's ideas about what a democratic classroom looks like, but also the Ira Shore writing process made it more collaborative effort versus an individual one, but everybody's ideas were taken into consideration. This is definitely an approach I would adapt in my own classroom to encourage group writing, revision, critical reflection, and evaluation.

The second workshop, "Digital Storytelling," served mainly as an introduction to a few interesting digital storytelling programs such as Storyboard That and Screencastify. My take away? It's not as complicated as you think to incorporate digital tools into the writing process, and in many cases adds details that help students rethink their writing process! Sarah Jane DelSanto from Portsmouth MS spent time discussing how technology now encourages students to not only write for themselves and a single person (i.e., the teacher) but public audiences, meaning... they should think more carefully about what they're putting out there because it carries more weight than just a grade. I loved the idea of using Screencastify for simple things like Google Docs and PP presentations.

Overall, the conference was rewarding, and I go back to the words I quoted from the keynote address introduction that Hicks had spoken the night before: it's about the people, as with all good things in life. I think it's easy to forget that we're not there for the testing or evaluations or reading books or essays, but for what these things do (or maybe don't...) for our students, the people we teach. They, above all else, make it a worthwhile pursuit.